Monday, 11 January 2016

DAY 1 : Don’t get overwhelmed




         After a good breakfast cooked by Gracie aunty, I left for CILA. It’s about 15 minutes to walk from where I stay during the course. I got there by 9:30 and filled in my name, address, qualification and contact number in a paper they gave me. Oxford Tefl will be sending my Cert.TESOL certificate to the address I put here.
          
           The office staff directed me to the TESOL class room. David, one of the tutors, had started taking the first session. There were 4 candidates in the room, Krishnan, Komal, Anu and Lisa. So it will be 5 of us doing Cert.TESOL in January. David let me in and I took a seat in the class. It was an air-conditioned, fully furnished, bright  class room. David is from Canada and he was so friendly and made us really comfortable.
           
             David handled the morning session up to 12:20pm. The session included getting to know each other at first where we go near the board and introduce ourselves and answering the audiences’ questions.  He gave us the 5 weeks’ time table and guided us through it for a while. Later he made us in to two groups; a group he’ll be training for the coming two weeks and the next group will get the training of Helen (another tutor) for the same amount of time. After two weeks we will switch the tutors. Anu and I are in the group of Helen and the rest of us in David’s. Helen will train us how to deal with the advanced learners and David with basic ones.

            David explained the necessity of learning students’ needs before you go and take and English lesson for them. He explained ways to get that done before we start our teaching practices in the coming days. He said tomorrow we’ll get to see how David and Helen teach students as they’ll be teaching by having us as ‘observers’. This is a great idea to make us prepare for our lessons in the coming days.

       I had brought lunch from ‘home’ (I’ll be calling the house I’m staying ‘home’ from now on). So we had it at the lunch time, which was from 12:30 to 1:30.

           The afternoon session was by Helen, another tutor, and it was all about describing all the stuff we will have to do as the course progresses. With her sense of humor we were enjoying every words she would say  in her pure British accent (She's from England by the way). She explained the complete modules of the course and what we are expected to do. She said she’ll be giving us a French class tomorrow in order to make us realize what a student feels in a foreign language learning class.  Later, we were asked to talk to IELTS students at CILA to know their needs by learning English. We also had to find out their language backgrounds. I talked to a group of 5 or 6 students and finished my task. The first day is OOWVA!

Looking forward to the guided observation session and the French class tomorrow!

                                              
                                         à demain!




 

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